text: Electro-osmotic flow was first reported in 1807 by Ferdinand Friedrich Reuss (18 February 1778 (Tübingen, Germany) – 14 April 1852 (Stuttgart, Germany)) in an unpublished lecture before the Physical-Medical Society of Moscow; Reuss first published an account of electro-osmotic flow in 1809 in the Memoirs of the Imperial Society of Naturalists of Moscow. He showed that water could be made to flow through a plug of clay by applying an electric voltage. Clay is composed of closely packed particles of silica and other minerals, and water flows through the narrow spaces between these particles just as it would through a narrow glass tube. Any combination of an electrolyte (a fluid containing dissolved ions) and an insulating solid would generate electro-osmotic flow, though for water/silica the effect is particularly large. Even so, flow speeds are typically only a few millimeters per second.
  Electro-osmosis was discovered independently in 1814 by the English chemist Robert Porrett Jr. (1783–1868).